Tiger's up and running now!
I first did an Upgrade installation but this ended up in frustration as Spotlight can't seem to stop indexing! My Powerbook fan won't stop spinning and the hard drive area was abnormally hot. (I assume I have so many files to index!) I've read that there's supposed to be a timer of how much time's left for Spotlight to index everything... but I never saw that. So I decided to do the following...
Erase and format as Extended journaled
Custom Install without Language Translations (1.1GB)
No X11 (89.2MB)
For a grand total of 3.6GB of Tiger....
and here are the good and bad news...
The Bad News
1. I lost all my files in my Movies and Pictures folders. Quite simply, I forgot to back it up. I could have backed-up my entire User folder but instead focused only on the Documents and Music folders.
2. This leads to the good news because I have recovered my other more important files... mainly my students' grades, my personal and work documents, and my unsorted Desktop files.
The Good News
1. Amazingly, Tiger runs fast on a 1.25 GHz (256MB) Mac mini. Granted I haven't run the heavy weight programs like iDVD, iMovie, iPhoto, and Photoshop CS but normal work such as web browsing, email, and the new Dashboard and Spotlight processes all work fast.
The welcome screen with the spotlight effect, was refreshing to see... so was hearing the voice over.
2. The 1.33 GHz (1GB) 17" Powerbook works great. Photoshop CS, the iApps, and even Appleworks opens up so fast.
3. Apps that I love:
a. Spotlight - This is always an eye-popping experience for me. I just type a few letters and the search results immediately show. Indeed, as Steve Jobs mentioned at MacWorld, searching is similar to what we've always had in iTunes. I've observed that to be more efficient, Spotlight must begin to build its index from nothing. If you do an upgrade installation, letting Spotlight index files you already have, would take some time. Spotlight works best when it is "spoon-fed" files as they are restored or installed.
To my surprise, Spotlight is also a launcher! However, I've realized that Spotlight is best for a system wide search. Quicksilver is still the quickest launcher for me. (Incidentally, Quicksilver b40 was just released for Tiger.)
I now have a "Notes" folder where I keep text files. Any record I put there can easily be seen and retrieved by Spotlight. To add to this, Spotlight can see text in PDF and in text layers of Photoshop. Now that's indexing!
At the moment, I see no use for MacJournal, StickyBrain, and all of the notebook apps to organize notes.
b. Browsers - whoa! Safari 2.0 is the best browser yet! BenchJS testing resulted in 10.52 seconds. (As an aside, Opera clocks in at 7.12 seconds, however I encounter errors during browsing which I don't encounter in Safari. Camino and Safari match speeds but Camino still doesn't feel like a 100% Mac app. I haven't tested Firefox because I feel it's a waste of time ... now that Safari works amazingly great!). No websites have crashed Safari yet. I like what I see and I have dropped all my other browsers. Oh yeah, Internet Explorer is no longer installed by default.
Since there's a new built-in RSS reader, I've set my RSS feeds to update in the Bookmark bar. The fastest RSS update rate is 30 minutes -- I was wishing for a 15-minute update interval but the difference is almost negligible. Eventually, I installed NewsFire. I still like its simplicity, blogging, and podcast support.
c. Utilities - I've discovered there's a Dictionary, Grapher, and an updated Calculator. There's also a new feature called Voice Over Utilities -- once activated, merely hovering the pointer on any area of the screen makes "Fred" say or read what's under the pointer! This is great for those who have eyesight problems. Sherlock is still around and "Rendezvous" is now called "Bonjour." Stuffit Expander is nowhere to be found.
d. Dashboard - Dropping a widget on the desktop results in a cool liquid ripple effect. (The Mac mini does not show this animation.) So far I've tried tracking flights, checked the pronunciation and definition of some words, and translated some Japanese characters to English! I now have three clocks (New York, London, and Riyadh). The Weather widget is set for Guam (the default was Cupertino). To change individual widgets, just "flip" them over!
e. Screensavers - The new ones are iTunes artwork, Nature patterns, Paper shadow, Spectrum, .mac, and my favorite, RSS Visualizer.
f. Automator - This is like Object-Oriented Programming. The last time I got close to programming in this manner was during my college days when I still had an Amiga! My first Automator mini project was to have a folder of images burned to a CD. This can be done with the Tiger's new Burn Folder but making the process in Automator was more fun. (There are other samples. For example, getting mail and putting the text in an iPod). I see a deluge of Automator scripts once Tiger's user base expands.
Last words
Just like what I've blogged earlier, installing Tiger is like getting a new Mac. Not only are there new features to discover, applications are being updated almost everyday. I began my blog in 2003 to document my experiences with OS X. With Tiger, it's like "switchblogging" again for the first time!
My thanks to Gino for the support!
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